Contents

Unused Cards

To do:Throughout the game files there are quite a few card variations which are seemingly unused, having been replaced by slightly modified versions. Find and document them.

Removed Book Press

This page or section needs more images.There's a whole lotta words here, but not enough pictures. Please fix this.Specifically: Animations

Prior to the game's release, a book press was located near the boiler on Book Assembly Island. It was removed due to most of the game's testers incorrectly thinking that it was part of a puzzle. The card from which the book press could be interacted with is still in the game (including the animations for the press closing and opening, though without any sounds), although the card cannot be accessed from any other card. If the player is placed there by modifying a save file or by using console commands, the book press can be interacted with normally, although once the player moves to another card, they won't be able to return.

The book press was not removed from all of the images it was in, however, and is still visible in the background of a few of the ones used in-game:

(left side of image, below center)

(bottom of image, right of center)

(bottom-left of image)

Alternate Path to Dome on Temple Island

Unused

Used

Unused

Used

Unused

Used

Unused

Used

Unused cards are present showing that originally in the place of the elevator used to access the dome on Temple Island was a short ladder and a door. These can also be accessed via save file editing or console commands, although only part of the original path can be accessed, as the rest is missing and attempting to access it will cause the game to hang.

Unused Lagoon Cards

There are a few cards near the Wahrk rocks in the lagoon on Jungle Island which cannot be accessed in-game, except through save file editing or console commands.

Butterfly Drawer

This drawer of butterflies in Gehn's lab can't be opened in-game, although a frame showing it open exists in the game's resources (without any associated opening/closing animations). The drawer above this one (the only one which can be opened) is a Spyder hotspot location.

Console

Please elaborate.Having more detail is always a good thing.Specifically: The functions of most of these commands need elaboration.

To do:

Using the 'hs' command, a load of unused (and broken) zip mode hotspots become visible (throughout the entire game). Either document them all or just mention it somewhere in the article.

On a related note, the deactivated zip mode hotspot in the second screenshot here is one of the aforementioned broken hotspots; find a better place to take a demonstrative screenshot and replace the current one.

Screenshot showing the effects of the debug command: the two lines above the console display the current stack & card, the current CyanCardID, the current mouse cursor position, the IDs of any hotspots the cursor is currently over, and any currently-playing movies (in this case the animation of the flames). This screenshot was generated using the dump command.

Screenshot showing the effects of the hs command: green boxes with text in the upper-left corner are spots that can be clicked to travel to another card, and red boxes are currently deactivated hotspots – the red hotspot in the upper-right of this image is a zip mode hotspot (with zip mode disabled) and the small red hotspot containing text leads to the card with the removed book press.

While in-game, typing "b3hn" and pressing Ctrl + Tab will allow a player to access the game's console. Accepted commands include:

g <id> – go to a specific card using a CardID

gc <id> – go to a specific card using a CyanCardID

gs <stack> [<id>] – go to a specific stack; CardID optional

get <state> – gets the value of a variable

set <state> <value> – sets the value of a variable

undo – undoes actions on the current card; autosave must be enabled

enable <hotspotID> – enables a hotspot

disable <hotspotID> – disables a hotspot

p – purges all purgeable blocks

c – compacts entire heap

pc – purges all purgeable blocks, then compacts entire heap

mem – returns total free memory (physical + virtual)

free – returns physical free memory

debug – toggles on-screen debug info

hs – toggles showing hotspots

autosave – toggles autosaving at every card

dump – copies the current screen to a BMP file

ipmm – toggles impatient PM mode

zip – dumps zip list to zip.txt

unvisit – some cutscenes only play when viewing a card for the first time; this command will erase the game's memory of which cards have been visited

slideshow – if disc 1 is inserted (or B2_DATA.MHK is otherwise present), activates the developer slideshow (see below). Also see the 40 individual image set commands in the table below.

riven1 and riven2 – neither of these do anything when entered (and they don't return "Unknown command"), but within Riven.exe they are located within the individual commands for the slideshow images, which may imply that these would have been the individual commands for 50040.png and 50041.png, if they had been present.

pleh – displays the following help text, line by line (this text indicates that the command to view the help text is help, but entering 'help' will just give the response "Unknown command")

Developer Slideshow

This needs some investigation.Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page.Specifically: The image of Matt Christmann (#27) doesn't appear correctly for me in-game; can anyone else corroborate?

The developer slideshow (featuring the team at Brøderbund that worked on the game, and occasionally their families) consists of 45 images, stored in B2_DATA.MHK, which are displayed for five seconds each, along with a short caption, when the 'slideshow' command is used. The images 50040.png and 50041.png are not present, nor are there captions in the game's data corresponding to them (though there are two unused commands – see above).

There are also 40 other related commands which will only display individual 'sets' of images (usually individual images). A different set of captions is used when viewing the images via the individual commands, though there are only minor differences in the captions for images 14 ("Glenn Axworthy (Hey, what else do you want? It works in Living Books!)" rather than "Glenn Axworthy. Hey, what else do you want? It works in Living Books!!") and 27 (Matt Christmann rather than "Matt Christmann"), the rest being identical.

Something of note is that the photo of Ben Ceschi (#5) contains a faint outline of a spider in the right of the image, which could be taken to imply that Ben Ceschi is the 'Spyder' behind the infamous Spyder easter eggs. Then again, perhaps not, given that Ben Ceschi was from Brøderbund, rather than Cyan.